...muttering the words, "Fukushima," or "Chernobyl" or "Three Mile Island" either alone or in combination of 2 or 3, as if, in their (withered) minds this ends all conversation.
I'm not sure how much money should be spent to make nuclear reactors "safer" when we're burning coal and other dangerous fossil fuels kill people continuously in vast numbers. It would have been a good idea to have built the reactors at Fukushima differently, without the back up generators in the basement, or perhaps, even better, to have built thermoelectric generators powered by used nuclear fuel in its cooling phase.
This said, I don't oppose safety improvements to existing reactors if and when they are reasonable.
In a rational world, in my opinion, decisions about infrastructure investment should be risk based, for example, using the expectation value, the probability of an event and the likely outcome in lives lost. Were this the case the most reasonable expenditure would be to provide clean sanitation to the two billion people on this planet who lack it, for one example.
The estimates of potential losses of lives associated with failed reactors that guide our regulatory environment are based on 1930's and 1940's science, some of which was apparently involved in suspect work. This is the LNT (linear no-threshold) hypothesis, often stated by dumb people as "there is no safe level of radioactivity." The LNT is extremely primitive, particularly since the work on which it is based took place before the development of the science of molecular biology, a science that in fact, did not exist in the 1940's. Molecular biology does not support it.
The unintentional "experiments" at Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl - the latter being by far the worst nuclear reactor failure ever, and in fact, the worst conceivable - show that the risk of death assumed before Chernobyl and indeed before Three Mile Island - was greatly inflated. This is an observed result, not an extrapolation of the LNT hypothesis, which should be considered absurd on its face, on reflection, since all human beings must contain radioactive potassium-40 to remain alive; indeed all living things require potassium, which has always contained potassium-40, and they always will.
I'm thus very, very, very, very sensitive about even talking about Fukushima as if it mattered. On scale, it doesn't. People all around the world dropped dead from extreme heat. Major rivers disappeared. Glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply melted, causing 1/3 of Pakistan to go under water. Major ecosystems are collapsing, and in the forest case, are doing so by fire. Eighteen thousand people will die today from exposure to air pollution, at a rate of around 7 million per year.
And yet people want to talk all about Fukushima?
I'm sorry if my trigger finger was fast, but for the life of me, I have a hard time figuring out why it is that Fukushima is so damned important, the point of my post on the disastrous public mentality that has taken hold in Europe with respect to energy, a mentality that is killing the whole planet wherever it shows up, in Europe or elsewhere.
As for "Hillary's emails," I am merely noting how many articles have appeared in the media, let's say in the New York Times, for example, on Fukushima as opposed to discussions of the 18,000 people who will die today from dangerous fossil fuel waste, aka "air pollution" without a peep from the media.
To me, these two things are intertwined, media attention on Fukushima and media attention on Hillary's email, and now, Hunter Biden's laptop.
Have a nice afternoon.
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